“But you’re ahead of me on something else. I don’t know why it’s important.”
“You couldn’t guess,” Chee said. “It’s something personal.”
“Oh,” Leaphorn said. He ducked his head, shook it, and said, “Oh,” again. Sad, now. And then he looked up. “You know, they could have had this thing staked out, though. An important client. Maybe they had some law firm out here retained to tip them off if anything turned up that would bear in any way at all on this son-and-heir being missing. They knew he was a mountain climber. So when an unidentified body turns up . . . “ He shrugged. “Who knows how law firms operate?” he said, not believing it himself.
“Sure,” Chee said. “Anything’s possible.”
Leaphorn was leaving, hat in hand, but he stopped in the doorway and turned.
“One other thing that might bear on all this,” he said. He told Chee of Sergeant Deke’s account of the man with the binoculars and the rifle on the canyon rim. “Deke said he’s going up the canyon and warn Nez that somebody may still be trying to kill him. I hope we can figure this out before they do it.”
Chee sat for a moment looking at the closed door, thinking of Leaphorn, thinking of Janet Pete, of John McDermott back in New Mexico. Was he back in her life? Apparently he was. For the first time, the Fallen Man became more than an abstract tragedy in Chee’s mind. He buzzed Jenifer.
“I’m taking off now for Gallup,” he said. “If Largo needs me—if anybody calls—tell them I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Hey,” Jenifer said, “you have two meetings on the calendar for this afternoon. The security man from the community college and Captain Largo was—”
“Call them and tell them I had to cancel,” Chee said, forgetting to say please, and forgetting to say thanks when he hung up. Captain Largo wouldn’t like this. But then he didn’t particularly like Captain Largo and he sure as hell didn’t like being an acting lieutenant.
44 of 102
15/03/2008 19:57
TheFallenMan
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/Local%20Settings/Te...
15
LOUISE GUARD’S FORD ESCORT
was not in the driveway of the little house she shared with Janet Pete in Gallup. Good news, but not as good as it would have seemed when Jim Chee was feeling better about life. This evening his mood had been swinging back and forth between a sort of grim anger at the world that Janet occupied and self-contempt for his own immature attitude. It hadn’t taken long for Chee, who was good at self-analysis, to determine that his problem was mostly jealousy. Maybe it was 90 percent jealousy. But even so, that left 10
percent or so that seemed legitimate.
He gave the door of his pickup the hard slam required to shut it and walked up the pathway with the videotape of the traditional wedding clutched in one hand and the other holding a pot of some sort of autumn-blooming flowers he’d bought for her at Gallup Best Blossoms. It wasn’t a very impressive floral display, but what could you expect in November?
“Ah, Jim,” Janet said, and greeted him with such a huge and enthusiastic hug that it left him helpless—tape in one hand and flowerpot in the other. It also left him feeling guilty. What the devil was wrong with him? Janet was beautiful. Janet was sweet. She loved him. She was wearing a set of designer jeans that fit her perfectly and a blouse of something that shimmered. Her black hair was done in a new fashion he’d been observing on the nighttime soap opera shows. It made her look young and jaunty and like someone the muscular actor in the tank top would be laughing with at the fancy party in a Coca-Cola commercial.
“I’d almost forgotten how beautiful you are,” Chee said. “Just back from Washington, you should be looking tired.” Janet was in the kitchen by then, watering whatever it was he’d brought her, opening the refrigerator and fixing something for them.
“It wasn’t tiresome,” she shouted. “It was lots of fun. The people in the BIA were on their very best behavior, and the people over at Justice were reasonable for a change. And there was time to see a show some German artist had going in the National Gallery. It was really interesting stuff. Partly sculpture and partly drawings. And then there was the concert I told you about. The one in the Library of Congress hall. It was partly Mozart. Really great.”
Yes. The concert. He’d thought about that before. Maybe too much. In Washington and at the Library of Congress it wouldn’t be a public event. It would be exclusive. Some sort of high-society fund-raiser. Shaking down the social set for some worthy literacy cause, probably. Almost certainly it would be by invitation only. Or just members and guests for the big-money patrons of library projects. She’d mentioned some ambassador being there. He had thought, once, that John McDermott might have taken her. But that was crazy. She detested the man. He had taken advantage of the leverage a distinguished professor has over his students. He’d seduced Janet. He’d taken her to Albuquerque as his live-in intern, had taken her to Washington as his token Indian. She had come back to New Mexico ashamed and brokenhearted when she realized what he was doing. There were a dozen ways McDermott could have learned the Fallen Man had been identified. Leaphorn, as usual, was right. McDermott’s firm probably had connections with lawyers in New Mexico. Of course they would. They would be working with Arizona and New Mexico law firms on Indian business. Anyway, he damn sure wasn’t going to bring it up. It would be insulting.
From the kitchen the sound of something clattering, the smell of coffee. Chee inspected the room around him. Nothing different that he could see except for something or other on the mantle over the gas-log fireplace. It was made of thin stainless steel tubing combined with shaped Plexiglas in three or four colors held together by what seemed to be a mixture of aluminum wiring and thread. Most peculiar. In fact, weird. Chee grinned at it. Something Louise had found somewhere. A conversation piece. Louise haunted garage sales, and in Gallup, garage sales were always offering odd harvests.
Janet emerged with a cup of coffee for him—fragile china on a thin-as-paper saucer—and a crystal goblet of wine for herself. She snuggled onto the sofa beside him, clicked glass against cup, smiled at him, and said, “To your capture of a whole squadron of cattle rustlers, your promotion to commander in chief of the Navajo police, chief honcho of the Federal Bureau of Ineptitude, and international boss of Interpol.”
“You forgot my busting up the Shiprock graffiti vandals and election as sheriff of San Juan County and
